6 Easy Ways To Improve Your SEO

Most people may not think about it, but every time they enter a search into a Google, there is a huge competition among millions of web pages to be at the top of that search. Many business owners fail to realize just how competitive the SEO between pages can get. Since most people know the basics of good SEO (e.g. using keywords, link building, etc.), business owners need to be on the lookout for any new trends in SEO that can be applied to their site. Being ahead of the curve benefits the business owner as they reap the SEO benefits that others haven’t realized yet. Additionally, SEO normally follows trends in how people use the internet, so trying to keep on the cutting edge of SEO will also ensure that a site has the features that modern consumers want. To help business owners improve their SEO and build better web experiences for their customers. Here are six easy new ways to improve your site’s SEO.

Improve Your Website’s Speed
As the speed of the internet increases on desktop and mobile devices, consumers have become increasingly impatient about waiting for sites to load. According to one report, most users expect a site to load within eight seconds before they leave for another site. Improving the speed of the site has several SEO benefits. As stated before, people will often leave a site that loads slowly. This increases the bounce rate which hurts SEO. The algorithm sees that whenever people clicked that link they left quickly and assumes that the content or site weren’t useful. Additionally, sites that are too slow can hinder the search engine indexing process and some of the content won’t get shown in search results. Google is even experimenting with a “slow” label that would appear in the search results for sites with speed issues. So improving the speed of the website is something business owners should act quickly to do.

Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
The growing importance of mobile devices needs to translate into actual changes to the way a website is made. Remember, Google has a separate algorithm entirely for mobile devices, which focuses on how the needs of searchers vary based on the type of device they’re using. Also Google will begin labeling sites as mobile friendly in mobile search results starting April 21st. This means going beyond having a responsive design. In fact, a responsive-designed website would probably not get the mobile friendly label. One of the criteria for mobile friendliness is that the links are spread apart enough that they’re easy to click. This doesn’t happen with most responsive designs which would shrink the size of buttons to fit them on a mobile screen. Similarly, the text can’t be too small, which happens on some mobile sites. A quick fix for many websites is to install a mobile plugin. However some companies will require an entire separate mobile site be built to offer the same functionality as the desktop site but in a mobile friendly way.

Add HTTPS to your URLs
Another trend website owners need to get in front of involves security. There have been major breaches to the security of major websites over the past few years and people are growing more concerned about the safety of the sites they use. To promote better internet security, <a href="http://www.webmarketingpros website link.com/blog/why-you-shouldnt-wait-to-add-https-to-your-retail-site/”>Google began giving SEO boosts to sites that use HTTPS servers back in 2014. In brief terms, HTTPS is a more secure way to run a website than traditional HTTP. It prevents man-in-the-middle attacks which would theoretically stymie the efforts of criminals or government agencies around the world to use sites with poor security as a means to gather information. Making the switch from HTTP to HTTPS is a little more complicated than the other items on this list. It’s easy in that all you need to do is have someone who knows how to handle the server transfer and it’s a one-time fix. And as was stated before, Google has already begun giving out SEO boosts to sites with HTTPS, so sites without it are at a disadvantage SEO-wise.

Get More Social
There are a lot of great reasons for business owners to use social media, but it’s important to remember the potential SEO benefits. Social media is a great way to build links, by getting content on the network and spreading it to others. Each time a person shares or likes content on a social media site, it creates a link because that person now has a link on their timeline that says they like the link. Social media also results in more clicks on a website. Recent studies have shown that a third of referral traffic from websites in 2014 came from social media SEO considers the amount of traffic going to a site when deciding Page Rank, so using social media to make content more popular is good for the site’s SEO. Best of all, with paid promotion, businesses can essentially pay to get the ball rolling and get their content shown to a lot of people. However, this doesn’t mean you can stick anything on social media and it will spread automatically. Effective social media marketing, even with paid promotion, takes a little bit of skill and trial and error.

Blog Daily
A surprisingly underused tactic for improving SEO is blogging. Blogging is easy to do and it can massively improve a site’s SEO. First, it gives more pages of content for the search engine to index for the site. A site with 10 pages can only target so many keywords effectively. But with a blog, each post is a new chance to target an entirely different set of keywords. Second, blogging creates content that people are more likely to engage with than regular website pages. To illustrate, when was the last time you were on Facebook and someone shared a business’s About Us page? Blog posts about Top Tens, helpful hints, surprising facts, opinions, etc.; this is the kind of content that gets shared and clicked on. And by writing a daily blog, or having someone write if for them, business owners have a better chance of creating content that spreads virally.

Tell the Truth
It’s often said that “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”; and the internet gave lies an extra speed boost. Try searching Google for “truth about” and insert any controversial topic, and you’ll get a wide range of pages of the truth, half truths, misconceptions, and out and out lies. Misinformation on the web is nothing new, but people are increasingly aware of it and are searching for a way to sort fact from fiction from the sites they see in the search. To that end, Google may have a plan to include truthfulness as a ranking factor in the future. A team of Google researchers recently did an experiment where they were able to rank 119 million web pages based on the truthfulness of their content. Essentially, they checked the site for factual data (things that can be verified) and see how often they got things right. They were able to successfully rank sites and those ranking proved accurate when examined by the researchers by checking the sites. Though this was just a research experiment, the fact that Google did it suggests there may be a truthfulness ranking factor to contend with in the future (which is arguably a good thing).

As these tactics illustrate, there are a lot of new and exciting things happening in SEO and business owners need to keep up. The competition for the top ranks is fierce and just a small advantage can make a huge difference in the amount of search traffic a site sees. The techniques mentioned in this article will improve a site’s SEO and create a better experience for those who use the site.